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"F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson" (The Village Voice) in this inventive and witty debut about a young man’s quest to become a writer and the misadventures in life and love that take him around the globe—from the author of Why We Came to the City

As early as he can remember, the narrator of this remarkable novel has wanted to become a writer. From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, Kristopher Jansma’s hopelessly unreliable—yet hopelessly earnest—narrator will be haunted by the success of his greatest friend and literary rival, the brilliant Julian McGann, and endlessly enamored with Evelyn, the green-eyed girl who got away. A profound exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, this delightful picaresque tale heralds Jansma as a bold, new American voice.

About The Author

Kristopher Jansma is the author of Why We Came to the City and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, he is now an assistant professor of English and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz and a graduate lecturer in fiction at Sarah Lawr...

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Rated 5 out of
5 by
SamuelB from
Best Book of 2013This novel is my personal favourite by an author of Jansma's generation. The prose is excellent, and very well crafted. Often his writing seems old fashioned, but still maintains a fresh manner. The story line is original, and engrossing for the reader. As this is his debut, there are some points which seem less stellar than others, but they don't detract from the overall strength of the novel. I highly recommend this book to every reader who is looking for something different within the current pool of contemporary creative writers.

Date published: 2015-09-27

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INTRODUCTIONTo the prim socialites at Raleigh's Briar Creek Country Club, he is Princeton-bound Walter Hartright. To an expectant but unsuspecting audience at his short-story reading at Berkshire College, he is "the one, the only, Pinkerton." To the rapt students in his Introduction to Journalism course at CCNY, he is the hip, unorthodox Professor Timothy Wallace. To the callow, rich boy whose homework he does for cash, he is the inscrutable Outis. We never quite find out who he is, and he may not know either. Both everyman and no man, he is the narrator of Kristopher Jansma's startling and extraordinary debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.For this man without a name life has never been straightforward. He comes to us first as a boy in an airport terminal, being tended to by the vendors at the airport shops; his mother, a flight attendant, has left him behind so she can dispense "honey-roasted peanuts at eighteen thousand feet" (p. 1). Already, though, the unnamed boy has learned to write. When we next see him emerging from high school, he has learned to lie, first to save the feelings and bolster the self-delusions of others, but then, with gradually decreasing innocence, to gain a handful of advantages in a corrupt and corrupting world. As both he and his lies grow more sophisticated, Jansma's narrator learns to live life on the diagonal, possibly telling the truth but, as he reads in an Emily Dickinson poem, telling it "slant" (p. 31). His life becomes a collection of feints, slants, and angles, resembling nothing so much, he realizes, as an enormous game of checkers, in which all other values threaten to give way to the unreasoning need to zigzag to the other side of the board. And yet one other goal remains in view, though out of reach: a beautiful, talented woman who, after sleeping with him five nights out of seven, abruptly marries for money and position, leaving him helpless and alone.As his travels carry him from Manhattan to the Grand Canyon to Dubai, Sri Lanka, Iceland, and beyond, the narrator continues to write, struggling to keep pace with his collegiate literary rival, Julian McGann. Wildly promiscuous and half-deranged by alcohol and ego, Julian produces the great novel of his generation-and then vanishes. Thereafter, the narrator's life transforms into a globetrotting quest to find-or avoid-Julian, to reconnect with the woman he loves, and to try to determine whether, like his own unpublishable fiction, the world is merely a pack of lies and illusions.Philosophically rich, brilliant in its explorations of metafiction, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards reads like an upside-down Candide, whose hero searches, not for truth, but for the ultimate lie in the best of all impossible worlds. In The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, Kristopher Jansma offers all that a reader might ask: intellectual depth; sincere and tortured passion; and, yes, a leopard.ABOUT KRISTOPHER JANSMAKristopher Jansma grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in the Writings Seminars from Johns Hopkins and an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia. His story "A Summer Wedding" took second prize in the 2011 fiction contest held by The Blue Mesa Review. His story "Aunt Gin and the Solipsist Slope" was a finalist in BOMB Magazine's 2011 fiction contest. He writes the Literary Artifacts column for Electric Literature's blog, The Outlet, and he's written articles for The Millions. Jansma lives in New York City and works as an adjunct professor and lecturer at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase. The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is his first novel.A CONVERSATION WITH KRISTOPHER JANSMAFirst things first: how does an adjunct professor working on two New York-area campuses manage to do any writing, let alone the thoughtful, sophisticated work that went into The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards?During the semesters, I've typically taught five sections a week-though I've done as many as seven, and yes, often on two campuses, though they are thankfully close to one another. When you factor in the preparation and the grading and the advising and another four or five hours at a tutoring desk, it's a lot of work, as thousands and thousands of other young adjunct professors around the country can tell you. But I actually get more writing done during these packed semesters than I do over the summers. When I know I can just get to it later, it's too easy to put off. But when I've only got one free hour to write, and that it might be my only hour for the next two or three days . . . I have to give it everything I've got.Beyond that, though, teaching gives me the chance to spend several hours each day thinking about writing and talking about writing . . . figuring out how to make it interesting to younger people who often don't read or write very much outside of class. When you walk into a room full of eighteen-year-old students and it is 8:15 AM and half of them haven't even gone to bed yet, you've got two options: One, you can just get up there and give them material and tell them it'll be on a test or a quiz . . . Or, two, you can get up there and tell them, "Here's why it matters. Here's what you'll be able to do, if you listen to what I have to say. And then I want to hear from you because this goes both ways." If you go with option number two, when you walk out of that classroom at 9:30, you're going to easily be twice as jazzed as they are-and that's when I want to sit down and write something I've never seen written before.Your teaching has given you some rather prickly views about the state of higher education, and you aren't shy about expressing them in your novel. What's wrong with teaching at the collegiate level these days, and how do you think we might start changing it?Well, first, let's be clear: many of those opinions are the narrator's, not mine! And he expresses them at a pretty low point in his life, when he's losing all faith in his life as a writer.Two years before I began working on Leopards, I was teaching at a city college and I was totally new to the job. I'd sent out CVs to dozens of schools and no one was hiring, and then just a week before the semester began, the chair at this college called me up and said that someone had just quit and would I take two sections? I said of course I'd do it, and he said, "Great. Pick out a textbook and show up on the first day!" And that was basically it. There wasn't an orientation or a syllabus or a list of course expectations or anything.So I walked in on the first day and started talking about William Zinsser and more or less made the rest up as I went along. I brought in readings I liked and some I thought they'd like. There were thirty-five students in each class. By week four or five, I had maybe twenty-five still showing up. By the end of the semester, I only had fifteen coming regularly, and about five more kids who showed up just enough to pass. And I was so upset-I thought for sure I'd be fired. Some of the kids were doing really well and were really into it, but I knew a huge portion of the class would fail.Finally I found another professor to talk to about it and he laughed and said not to worry. The attrition rate for first-year students at the college was over fifty percent. It was just a given that kids would either give up, drop out, or fail because they couldn't handle it even if they tried hard. No one saw it as their own failing, because it was built into the system . . . so I wrote the first pieces of that chapter back when I was feeling that disillusionment pretty intensely.But in the years since that first class, that school has put more effort into supporting its teachers and its first-year students. I began teaching at another college, which also had a high attrition rate and lax admissions standards . . . but they were working hard to change it. There are practical paths toward improvement, but the main thing is that someone has to care about the students. College needs to be a place where a student can discover they're capable of more than they ever believed possible-not the other way around.The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards begins and ends in an airport terminal-a place that is not quite a place but rather a point of transition between places. Your novel seems to thrive on the moment and energy of transition; it never comes to rest, either geographically or in any other sense. Why such restlessness?Airport terminals, train stations-they're places that never change and yet are constantly in flux. As you say, most people are rushing through from one place to another-and whenever I'm in an airport, I wonder about all the people who are there day in, day out, watching the rest of us. To me that's exactly what being a writer is like. Everyone else is rushing around, trying to get from point A to point B; my job is to sit back and watch all that restlessness, and hit pause on one person-make them stand still so that I can capture what's driving them.Incidentally, I love writing at airports. Part of this stems from my constant fear of missing flights-I will inevitably end up at the airport with hours to spare, but luckily it's also really the perfect place to write. It's a self-contained universe; you've got everything you need in one bag; no one from the outside world can really bother you. If anyone calls you, you've got the perfect excuse not to be disrupted, "Oh, sorry, I'm at the airport. Can't talk right now." It's very liberating!Your book also continually expresses a fascination with diagonals: the zigzag movements of men on a checkerboard; the slant truths of Emily Dickinson poems. What attracts you to movements on the bias?"On the bias." I like that. Great double-meaning to that word . . . I should have worked that term into the book somewhere!At Johns Hopkins University, where I studied as an undergraduate, our introductory Fiction and Poetry course was split into two halves. The fall semester was called Telling it Straight and the spring was Telling it Slant, taken right from that Dickinson poem. So from the very beginning of my study of writing, I was thinking about writing in those terms. That first semester I wrote some of my very first stories, and they were almost all taken directly from my own experiences or those of friends from high school. It wasn't until the second semester that I began to understand how sometimes making something up out of pure imagination could be a far more truthful story.The two main characters of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, your nameless narrator and his "frenemy" Julian McGann, have a great deal in common-they're both gifted but slightly deranged writers who have trouble putting down roots-and yet you manage to develop them as distinct and different characters. How did you manage to keep them from blurring together? Over the years I spent in classes and workshops with other writers, I think I developed a sense for the many, many varieties of writers out there. And if we are slightly deranged then I'd say we each go about it in our own unique way. No, seriously though, every writer comes at the task differently and for different reasons, and our literature is more diverse for it.The narrator sees Julian as a writer who is naturally gifted-simply more talented than himself. But like many novice writers, the narrator doesn't understand that, ultimately, talent is somewhat beside the point. Plenty of people with talent lack drive. Julian's dedication comes from this kind of total obsessiveness, but this also threatens him. He'd rather be writing than sleeping or bathing or eating or experiencing the outside world. It can become an addiction, and it can really break people, as it does in Julian's case.The narrator's dedication comes mainly from his envy of Julian's dedication, and he romanticizes the sacrifices that he sees his roommate making . . . which I think we all do sometimes. We talk about how much Hemingway could drink and Byron's scandalous sex life, and even come to believe that self-destruction is a prerequisite for being a writer, instead of a very perilous side effect. Anyway, as the narrator learns, envy can be a very good motivator, but I think it can only take you so far. You've got to have something else to get you through the final stretch.Your readers are likely to have come across other unnamed narrators, like Ellison's invisible man or Dostoevsky's paradoxalist from the underground. However, few such narrators are as teasingly and playfully presented as the alias-rich voice of your novel. Why did you choose not to give him a real name, and did you have as much fun with the whole nameless motif as you appear to have had?Absolutely, I had fun with it. I love The Invisible Man and Notes from the Underground. My favorite unnamed narrator might be from The Aspern Papers by Henry James. The narrator in that story is trying to con an old lady and her niece out of some valuable papers, and he's very upfront with us all along about how he manipulates them. He says he invents a nom de guerre, as in a war name used by a soldier, when he introduces himself to them - but he never tells us what it is. And then, later in the book, he casually mentions that he's confessed his true name to the niece, and you almost drop the book because it's so unfair that he'd tell her and not you! Anytime a book can trick you into thinking something like that, you know you're in good hands.Unnamed narrators have long been a fascination of mine, because here you have someone who is telling you a story, most likely confessing all sorts of personal and intimate things, and yet withholds the most basic social intimacy. And this creates a kind of suspicion. Anyone making a confession is also trying to sell you something--a version of events, a justification for wrongdoing, or even just a humanity behind certain actions. But when the person won't even tell you his name, then it makes you think twice about his agenda.Readers who glance at your table of contents and see that the two most substantial sections of the novel are titled "What Was Lost" and "What Was Found" might anticipate a straightforward story of failure and redemption. That turns out not to be exactly true, though the story is about losing and finding in a lot of ways. Care to comment?That's interesting. In a way it is a story of failure and redemption, though not a straightforward one, surely. Maybe it is a "slant-forward," redemption tale. But yes, it is a story about losing, right from the very first line. Losing novels, losing love, losing faith, losing friends . . . It could have been a very depressing book, except that I think that losing is also a first step toward changing. And that's the big question the narrator struggles with throughout - can he change his nature?There's a quote I stumbled upon while reading some of Salinger's old letters once, and it completely changed the way I wanted to end the book. While he was serving in WWII, Salinger wrote a letter home expressing his frustrations with the many stories he was continually writing while he was over there. He said he felt that no writer had "the right to tear his characters apart" if he didn't know how to put them together again. And that just hit me square on. I knew I had to figure out how to end the book without, as he put it, "leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath." It took a while but eventually I saw a way to do it, and that's when I finally settled on those section titles "What Was Lost" and "What Was Found."Your story also seems to take great pleasure in doubling. Your narrator has a doppelgänger. The lead woman is an actress, which is another kind of doubling. Many of the other characters have two names, and, of course, the manuscript comes in two halves of the same height and "consistency." What makes doubling so intriguing to you?Doubling comes up in the story in many different places, but often it is a way of exposing change. When you hold a copy and an original far apart, it can be very hard to see any difference. But when you put them right beside one another, all the tiny modifications become easier to spot-like one of those puzzles in a Highlights for Children magazine.As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to take a graduate seminar with Professor John Irwin, who had written tremendous essays and books about doubling in modern literature. One concept he introduced me to, I remember, was a gnomon. It's what the Greeks called the triangular piece on a sundial that casts the shadow that goes around slowly over time. In literature, a gnomon can be anything or anyone that the protagonist meets early in the novel and then sees again towards the end of the book. By contrasting the protagonist's reactions to these two encounters, a reader can better see how he has changed during the time between.Your novel is strewn with unattainable women and with quite a few highly available gay men. Would you like to talk a bit about the sexual mood of the book?Well, I think the women are only one of many unattainable things that the narrator yearns for, especially in the first half of the book. He wants to best Julian in the story contest, he wants to write this novel, he wants to fit into this world of privilege, and he wants Evelyn to run off with him. But to be always wanting something and never actually having it is to exist forever in a fiction. It can always be whatever you imagine and never what it truly is. Maybe that tells us something about his reticence to be with the women in the book who are attainable.As for Julian's "high availability," the narrator implies this at various points, but conspicuously he never considers that Julian might love, or be loved, by these men. They are so interchangeable to the narrator that he meanly refers to them all as "Simons"-a joke he shares with Evelyn. And yet there is real love between Julian and the narrator, which is not sexual, but which the narrator cannot seem to speak about.Talking about sex all the time is the mark of someone who doesn't know anything about real love, and I wanted that to come across in the way the narrator talks about Julian's sex life, as well as his own.The way in which your narrator approaches the honeymooners in Dubai reminded me a lot of M. Clamence in Camus's The Fall. Do you count that book among your influences? What do you see as your major influences, for that matter?There were a lot of influences on Leopards, that varied wildly from chapter to chapter. I did read The Fall, quite a long time ago, so maybe it crept in there. I had mainly been thinking, in that chapter, of telling a sort of Thousand and One Nights type of story within a story-which rose up out of the Middle Eastern setting, but which also fit that moment nicely, where the two halves of the novel meet. It's a little jarring, and the reader needs a little jarring there.Other chapters came out of other, different places. I wrote the eponymous chapter just after seeing Waiting for Godot on stage for the very first time. The next week I saw the British film Withnail & I and that got me thinking about the next chapter, which I named "Anton and I" out of respect to the film, which is brilliant. And "In the Writer's Colony" had a bit of "In the Penal Colony" behind it, at least at first . . . I think I had just been teaching that story and it seemed to resonate with the themes. The whole book came together in this way. I'd be working on other things and then I'd run across something somewhere that just felt like Leopards.I also caught more than a hint of Hunter S. Thompson. Is he another personal guru?I had avoided Thompson for a long time because I thought of him as a guy who mainly wrote about drugs, which don't really interest me much. But then I happened across Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, and I loved it, and I wondered if maybe Thompson's title was a nod to Orwell's. So I picked up Fear and Loathing one day and read the first page and was completely riveted. The narrator's voice just sucked me right in. I'd expected it to be sloppy and sprawling and surreal, but it was so crystalline and so real. And really funny! I wasn't expecting that. Plus it gave a firsthand account of something that couldn't be described any other way, like poverty in Orwell's book.But, I couldn't say he was a "personal guru" because I never read another book of Thompson's after that one, and I don't know that much about his life.I think in terms of personal gurus, I'd have to go with writers whose lives inspire me as much as their work: David Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, Nabokov, Fitzgerald. They leave me in total awe of what they can do. I don't know that I can call them influences though, because I don't dare try to write like them. I sort of want to go on believing that what they can do is just magic that can't be replicated.It's interesting that you have written a novel that deceives its readers with Mephistophelean glee but that truth clearly means so much to you. What do you have to say about our current cultural preoccupation with regard to truth?Like "Professor Wallace" I am really fascinated with fakers and plagiarists and liars. I'm really a terrible liar myself and I'm always intrigued by people who can do it so effortlessly. Growing up, I used to love the character of George on Seinfeld, who advises Jerry on passing a lie detector test: "It's not a lie if you believe it." And that's one thing I wonder about-do these people really believe their own lies? A writing professor of mine once opined that fiction was "something that could have happened, but didn't." Jonah Lehrer wrote several things that Bob Dylan might well have said, but happened not to. Stephen Glass made up stories which could have happened, but didn't. That's fiction.And people are upset by betrayals like these-and rightly so-because when you write something and say it is true, you're asking people to go out on a limb and take you at your word. If they find out you're lying, then it's a breach of that contract. To me it's important to keep in mind that James Frey started out trying to sell A Million Little Pieces as a work of fiction. Nobody wanted to publish it. Call it a true story, however, and it becomes a bestseller that sweeps the nation and garners Oprah's seal of approval. Of course that was terribly, terribly wrong of him to do. But it also begs the question: Why does the same exact story fail to move us until we're told "this really happened"?People forget that fiction can be every bit as truthful as nonfiction. When the reader begins by accepting the premise that what they're about to read is not a factual account of real events or the actions of real people . . . And yet they will still hang on every twist, and still fall in love with the characters and pump their fists in the air when they do well and sob when they fail . . . Well, that's a very real thing.We take your point in the novel that all of fiction is a pack of lies. But can it afford to be just a grand deception? Do the lies mean anything at all unless they reveal some deeper truth?Absolutely not. There is no meaning to lies without that deeper truth, and more important, no, it can't afford it. We can't afford it.Elizabeth Bowen said, in her Notes on Writing a Novel, "The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie." And I think this is part of the limb that fiction asks you to step out on. There's a promise of some high-hanging fruit at the end of that limb. We read books all the time that fall short on this promise, I think. The characters make implausible choices or the author creates unearned twists in the plot, or the sentences just simply fail to animate our own imaginations. There's nothing irrefutably true about these things. Readers know, deep down, that the real world is a lot more complicated and interesting than that.But when that irrefutable truth is there, a beating heart beneath every paragraph, it allows a writer to tell greater and greater lies. There are some fantastic things that happen in Leopards. But my hope is that when readers come to the end of the novel, they will think, "Ok, yes, finally!" and not "Puhlllease! You expect me to buy this?"Your story within a story within a story about Colette Marsh and the Civil War-era gilder is a marvelous vignette. How did you come up with it?It was a leap for me, because I'd really never written historical fiction before, but it was something I'd always wanted to try. I'd initially written the "Anton & I" chapter without the excerpts included, but with the characters only describing the story enough that a reader might get an idea of what it was about. I wanted it to feel like a fantasy version of the narrator's situation with Evelyn, but for him to still feel like it might be hidden in some way-that he could reasonably believe she wouldn't think it was about her when she read it. Gold was already becoming a big motif in the other sections, and so I thought I'd set it during the Gilded Age. But then I began doing some research and discovered all this fantastic and horrible stuff about the Draft Riots in 1863, and it seemed like the perfect backdrop for this opulent wedding, and this story about class, and so then I had to shift it slightly to "Just Before" the Gilded Age. In my early drafts it remained a whole separate chapter, following "Anton and I" but it took us too far away from Julian and Evelyn, and so I trimmed it considerably and wove it directly into the earlier chapter.The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is prefaced by a sort of all-points bulletin, asking anyone who thinks he or she may be the author of the book to please contact Haslett & Grouse. Has anyone come forward yet?No, but we're keeping our eyes open! Until then, I'm more than happy to continue taking the credit.The novel takes readers around the world and back again, to many different locales: Tokyo, Luxembourg, Sri Lanka, Iceland . . . Have you been to all these places? How did you do the research necessary to transport readers to these places? And I'm assuming you aren't fluent in French and Russian and Japanese and Icelandic . . .No, I'm not at all. In fact I may be the world's worst language student, and I have the report cards to prove it. I studied French in grade school and Russian in college, but I can barely remember a dozen words of either. Italian was the only course I ever failed outright. The only language I did well with was Latin, in middle school and high school, because we never had to speak it out loud. I could take my time on the translations, and I could also usually see the links between the Latin words and the English derivatives.For the translations in the book, I got by with a little help from my friends. My sister-in-law speaks fluent French. A student of mine had done a semester abroad in Japan, and she very kindly helped me out there. And thanks to social networking, I was able to reach some old friends who helped with the Russian and even the Tamil and the Luxembourgish! They also helped me with some of the cultural details, because there was simply no way I could manage to go to all these places myself.I did go to the Grand Canyon, and rafted the river with my family, and also to Luxembourg with my wife, and we spent a day in the old city there. I was also able to go to Ghana with my in-laws, who were taking a sabbatical to teach in Kumasi. But I haven't been to Dubai or Iceland or Sri Lanka. Yet. Those stories required a lot of research, in libraries and also online. It's pretty incredible what you can do these days. A few mouse clicks and I can be looking at a street view right outside of the Colombo Fort Railway Station. I can look at the cocktail menu for Vu's Bar in the Jumeirah Emirates Towers. I can go onto a forum where Indian couples are discussing Hindi weddings.People say you should write what you know, but that so depletes our possibilities, and by extent, our literature. It was important to me that the novel not just be limited to what I knew already. For me, writing has always been an excuse to learn a lot more than the little I know.DISCUSSION QUESTIONSWhat do you think is the significance of the title The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, and how do you think it relates to the novel as a whole?In his "Author's Note," how does Jansma set the tone for the remainder of the novel? What themes are introduced to which the story later returns?Why do you think Jansma's narrator chooses to conceal his identity behind a long series of aliases? How, if at all, would the novel have been different if the narrator had divulged his real name?The narrator posits that the writing of fiction boils down to the ability "to tell lies, for a living," and that "the best novelists make you believe, as you read, that their stories are real" (p. 129, p. 130). Do you believe that a great novelist is, in essence, a highly convincing liar? Or is there something more to great writing than masterfully sustained deception? If so, what?The narrator proclaims, "I'm a liar! That's just what I am. I lie like I'm breathing. I lie to everyone, myself most of all" (p. 178). For all his confessed lying, are there truths to be gathered from the narrator's stories? What kind of truth do his lies reveal?Colette Marsh appears first in a portrait in the Raleigh Museum of Art that the narrator smudges with his thumb. She surfaces again in the story embedded in chapter four, and her portrait (or one eerily like it) re-emerges at the end of chapter ten. What does Marsh appear to signify in the narrator's mind, and why are the vignettes in which she appears important to the meanings of the novel?The characters in the first part of the novel are inseparable. Do you think they make up a classic love triangle?Jansma's narrator repeatedly acts as a substitute for someone else-for Betsy Littleford's escort at her deb ball, for Julian at his literary reading, for Professor Wallace at CCNY. How do these substitutions both contribute to and undermine the narrator's sense of identity?Readers of novels sometimes expect good characters to be rewarded and bad characters punished. However, the moral mathematics of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is not nearly so straightforward. Is it a strength or a weakness of Jansma's novel that its plot does not make a point of punishing evil and rewarding virtue?Jansma's narrator appears almost literally to make himself up. How are his self-inventions different, if at all, from the ways in which real people go about defining themselves? How is the narrator's self-creation an ironic commentary on how identity is formed and subverted in the world we live in?Julian/Jeffrey makes it big with a "luminous" novel called Nothing Sacred. However, we learn basically nothing regarding what this novel is about. Imagine a plot and some major characters for Nothing Sacred (try to write a few pages of his novel if you're feeling brave) and have a conversation about your version of Julian/Jeffrey's novel.Why is Julian so insistent that he and the narrator must never, ever write about each other? Are they too much alike or too different? Might Julian even be another version of the narrator himself?Jansma suggests through his narrator "America no longer desires the truth, only the reasonable facsimile thereof. Like battered lovers, we're willing to settle. Our sense of values still holds us to dismiss that which we know, outright, to be blatant lies, but we avoid truth with equal intensity" (121). How valid is this criticism regarding the state of our culture? What do you think needs to be done about it?

Editorial Reviews

"At times, the novel is a string of short stories; at others, it is a set of matroyshka dolls, containing, at one point, a novel within a short story wihthin a novella within a novel. ...Jansma approaches them with wry humor and a steady hand. The narrator's games never fail to entertain, even if he is constantly changing the rules."--The New Yorker“[A] tricky picaresque thick with literary allusion from Fitzgerald to Amis…[A] clever, tightly paced novel of ever-upping stakes.” —Vogue.com"Playfully weird...I'd call this book "postmodern," but that makes it sound like it's not as pleasurable to read as it is."—Meg Wolitzer, author of the New York Times bestselling The Interestings on NPR.com“Though one might recognize bits of Dickens, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, this is simply a good case of stealing from geniuses. It’s a breathless work the celebrates the literary tradition, while making a strong case that its author belongs on the shelf beside his forebears.”—Time Out New York (5 Stars)“Couched in Jansma’s wildly recursive funhouse of a novel is a coming-of-age story…filled with clever literary allusions and insider jokes…[T]here’s plenty to relish in this noteworthy debut.”—Heller McAlpin for NPR.org“F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson…[T]he novel strikes a cord on questions of authenticity, love, and ambition, and it reminds us that life is often out of our control, even if we’re writing it down.”—The Village Voice“One of the best books of the year.”—Jeff Glor for CBS Author Talk“[Jansma is] a writer of extreme promise, who seems to belong to an older generation.”—Electric Literature “Recommended Reading”“[A] slippery and energetic debut novel…rapid in pace, the language and details tightly controlled…It’s tremendous fun, this book.”—San Francisco Journal of Books“[T]his mind-blowing spiral of a book will also appeal to anyone who enjoys their fiction as playful as it is intriguing.”—Book Reporter“The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards’ intricate narrative game and its carbon-burning escapades add up to a novel that is wise about identity and aspiration, competitive storytelling, romantic obsession and the assertion that ‘all these stories are true, only somewhere else.’”—Shelf Awareness“Captivating…[A] smart, searching debut about art and identity.”—Library Journal“[A] canny, seductive, and utterly transfixing tale about the magic of storytellingand the misery of writing…Like a magician pulling a seemingly endless string of colorful scarves from a hat, Jansma streams stories-within-stories-within-stories, each a diabolically clever homage… Readers will detect riffs on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Truman Capote, Bob Dylan, Tolstoy, Salinger, Borges, Kipling, and many more…A first novel with the strength and agility of a great cat leaping through rings of fire.”—Booklist (Starred)“[An] arresting debut…Jansma’s characters deftly explore the blurred lines between fact and fiction, discovering the shades of truth that lie in between.”—Publishers Weekly“Absorbing...Jansma [is] a writer to watch.”—Library Journal (2013 Fiction Preview)“A terrifically fun book that’s a little bit Calvino, a little bit Jennifer Egan, and a little bit the inside of every young artist that ever was. Concerned with the nature of storytelling, art, fallacy, and f**king up, and told as only a witty wordsmith can, we’re pretty sure it’ll be one of your favorites in the new year.”—Flavorwire / Named one of their “50 Up-and-Coming New York Culture Makers to Watch in 2013”“THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS is my new exhibit A for the defense of literary fiction. A great read—a must read. Kristopher Jansma is more than the real-deal. He's made himself, with this book, essential.”—Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You“Light and airy, THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS is a funhouse of a novel about the outsized ambitions of authors and the sneaky power of storytelling. Kristopher Jansma's debut is a whimsical round-the-world tour that recalls Calvino, Millhauser and The Confidence Man.”—Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster“Emblematic of its many delightful complexities, the writer-as-narrator of this exciting debut novel brings to mind both Holden Caufield and Tom Ripley. This is a coming of age novel, albeit not an especially tender one; rather it is infused with wicked satire on the pursuits of wealth, fame and love. As if he were running the literary equivalent of a game of 3-card Monte, Jansma's protagonist artfully charms and deceives his friends and readers as a means to revealing what is true. THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS is a remarkably smart novel and it's great fun, too.”—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route“Kristopher Jansma is a brilliant writer of energetic, original, intelligent, skillful and highly imaginative and hysterically funny fiction. Few writers of any age succeed in the chances he took with THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS. That he does so with such finesse, ease and maturity is astounding.”—Stephen Dixon, author of What Is All This?“Lies are as essential to our lives as truth, time, and love. With THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, Kristopher Jansma escorts us through a carnival funhouse of literary mirrors where truth and lies are so delightfully melded that we, like thecharacters themselves, don’t care to distinguish between them. The result is a dynamic, imaginative adventure featuring a trio of characters that are constantly shifting, yet instantly recognizable, as endearing as they are flawed. But the true leopards ofJansma’s novel may be the deep questions crouching deftly within its pages. I, for one, may never regard my own reflection with quite the same certainty again."—Kenneth Slawenski, author of J.D. Salinger: A Life“The brilliance of this novel slays me! With an extravagance of wit and grace, Kristopher Jansma has masterfully composed a chimerical, matroshka doll of a story as gripping as it is inventive, as moving as it is hilarious, populated with fascinating,singular characters about whom you long to know more and more and more. (Even the extras are drawn in pitch-perfect detail.) It reminded me of so many favorite novels, from David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten to Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and yet it’s so deeply original that all comparisons fall out the window. This is the most fresh and exciting novel I’ve read in ages.”—Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age